


Home

by Umbralpilot



Category: PlanetES
Genre: Family, Gen, Post-Canon, Tanabe tells it like it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-05-15
Packaged: 2018-01-24 23:21:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1620629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hachi is back on Earth. Tanabe has plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home

"Well, that’s nice," Goro drawls as the little girl shoves a pastels rendering of "daddy’s spaceship" in Hachi’s face with great enthusiasm. "When I first came home and saw you after a run, all you did was puke on me. Granted, you were three months old, but your mother swore it was deliberate."

"Argh, shut up, old man." Hachi’s tone makes it clear that the simple order is in lieu of something a lot more colorful. It’s pretty amazing, Ai thinks, how he knows to watch his mouth after seven years on the _von Braun_ with Goro for company. He makes entirely sincere oohing and cooing noises at Sora’s drawing. He promises to take her to see the real actual ship in dry-dock. He even apologies that the Jupiter-rocks he’d brought back just for her were confiscated in customs, and stands properly admonished when she reminds him that Jupiter is a gas giant _come **on** Daddy you’re an astronaut!_ It’s as though he came off the ship with seven years’ worth of fatherhood ready to tip and spill all over everything.

Goro stands back next to his daughter-in-law and smirks at the whole proceedings.

"It’s awful, isn’t it?" he says. "You do the hard work for seven years and he comes back and bam! instant adoration."

"Would you rather she didn’t adore him?" Ai asks, appalled. Goro chortles and shakes his head.

"Well," he says after another moment, and falls silent. He crosses his arms. He glances sidelong at Ai, not smiling anymore. He shifts slightly with one foot back, half a step. Then he says, "maybe I’m thinking of sparing her."

Ai looks back at him, not sidelong but straight on. She looks for a moment as though she’s going to give him a dressing-down on the subject of love and the universe, but it doesn’t come. Instead she says, “I got an offer from Technora, to take over from Fee.” And now she isn’t looking at him but at her husband and their daughter. “I’m starting this summer, in four months.”

Goro is dumbstruck. “You’re going back up there?”

"Yes."

"If you need money - "

"It’s not about money."

"And Sora?"

"Hachimaki’s home now," Ai says, her eyes luminous.

Goro stares at her. She’s young, he wants to think, but she isn’t so much anymore. She’s a grown woman and mother, has been for years now down here on Earth. He tries for comparisons, but she doesn’t remind him of his own wife, either. Suddenly he feels as thought he is a bit old. “Ai-chan,” he says, carefully. “You’ll give the kid a complex. Let her have one permanent parent - “

"She will. It’ll just be the other one." And she smiles at him, because that is just what Ai does. He can see why Hachi calls that smile a force of nature. "Sora’s used to have Daddy on screen, so now she’ll have Mommy there. It’s fine." She laughs a little. "I know that isn’t how they did it in your time."

He wrinkles his nose. “Never knew a kid with two astronaut parents.”

"Nono-chan’s worked out fine. I’ll introduce you."

"If you’re… feeling like Hachi’s been on adventures or something while you’ve wasted your life -"

"Sora isn’t a waste of anything," Ai says simply, "and neither was the _von Braun_.”

In a frenzy of excitement over something, Hachi scoops his daughter up in his arms. She tugs at his shirt with one little hand and waves at her mother with the other, babbling a light year a minute about gas giants and space mining and Tandem Mirror engines. She looks as though she has something of the greatest utmost urgency to report, and he looks like it too, eyes wild and grin enormous. Ai starts towards them. She throws over her shoulder back at Goro, “It’s all the same thing, you see, all connected. Sora knows. It’s all just love.”

Goro watches her go, watches her put her arms around her family and Hachi throwing a free arm of his own around her back. They hold Sora between them and now they’re all talking together, happy, close. He does feel a little old, but not in a bad way, perhaps. It’s good to see change as it happens, he thinks, it’s good to see a son grows wiser than you, a daughter grow bolder. And Sora will be fine, he thinks also. No one loved so well can be otherwise.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fixit fic of sorts - the only thing I had a problem with in the otherwise perfect Planetes was that the end seemed to suggest that Hachi had space and Ai had babies. I doubt it was that simple, so now I made it textual.
> 
> Sora as the name for Hachi and Ai's daughter is borrowed from [pts](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pts/pseuds/pts), with lasting adoration.


End file.
